iTunes tracks soon to bid farewell to blanket 99¢ pricing

Apple is about to flip the switch on its tiered pricing model in the iTunes …

After nearly four months of anticipation, music tracks from the iTunes Store will soon fall into their new pricing tiers. As of April 7, the blanket 99� standard will be gone, and three pricing tiers will be available to customers: 69�, 99�, and $1.29, depending on the relative hotness of the track. New and popular songs are expected to start out at $1.29, with older, catalog tracks weighing in at 69�.

Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller announced the new tiers in January at the 2009 Macworld Expo keynote. At that time, Apple also said that it would begin dropping DRM from all of its iTunes Store tracks, and that it expected all 10 million songs to be DRM-free by April. The pricing tiers were meant to coincide with the death of DRM from the iTunes Store, so the fact that the tiers will go into effect soon comes as no surprise.

Apple has not officially announced that this will occur on April 7, though according to the Los Angeles Times, Apple has notified record labels that the transition will happen on that date. (We must point out, however, that Schiller's slide from January—pictured here in this post—says "April 1, 2009.") Still, not everyone agrees that it's a good move, or that now is a good time. "This will be a PR nightmare," former EMI executive Ted Cohen told the Times. Indeed, variable pricing will make things more confusing for customers who are used to a more consistent pricing model.

And, referring to the industry's constant battle to compete with pirates, Nine Inch Nails band manager Jim Guerinot questioned whether it was smart to keep squeezing already-fickle customers. "Wouldn't it make sense to try to price it cheaper instead of squeezing the handful of people who are still willing to pay for music?" he said. Guerinot has a point, though we think customers who want to buy music are more likely to look for better prices through Amazon MP3 than to go straight to Bit Torrent. Still, from Apple's perspective, people being driven into the arms of Amazon could be just as bad.